The man who first conceived the modern university as we know it was Charles Eliot, a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, in 1869, at the age of only thirty-five, was appointed President of Harvard, where he had been an undergraduate. When Eliot arrived, Harvard had 1,050 students and fifty-nine members of the faculty. In 1909, when he retired, there were four times as many students and the faculty had grown ten-fold.
